A. Field of the Invention
The present invention is an image information reading device, especially to a wide image scanner which can scan the image of a large scale original using only an image sensor of a regular size.
B. Description of the Prior Art
A conventional scanner is designed for the most commonly used size of documents, such as A4, A3, B4, or even B3 sizes. The width of an image reading device, such as a Charge Coupled Device (CCD) or a Contact Image Sensor (CIS), is also designed wide enough to finish reading the image of the regular-sized original in a single pass. For scanning large scale sheets, such as posters or newspapers, the user would have to manually operate the scanner to scan the original portion by portion. Then, after the image of the entire original has been scanned, the user has to merge corresponding portions together by an application software. Such procedure is very tedious and time consuming. On the other hand, if the user would like to scan the large-scaled original in a single pass, the width of the image reading device must be wide enough to cover the width of the original. However, since such wide image reading device is very expensive, the implementation cost for the entire scanner will be very high.